All the desperate spinning of the media and the left will not undo the damage that the New York Times has done to the US effort to collect data that tracks terrorist's financial transfers. That's not the vast right wing conspiracy talking. That's the chairman of the 9/11 commission Thomas Kean.
Byron York interviewed Thomas Kean, the 9/11 Commission chairman, on the revelation of the covert terror-finance intelligence operation in the New York Times last week. Kean tells the National Review's White House correspondent that he tried to talk Bill Keller out of publishing the story, and pronounces the program dead as a result of Keller's decision:
Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.”
Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean called Times executive editor Bill Keller in an attempt to persuade him not to publish — has done terrible damage to the program. "I think it's over," Kean says. "Terrorists read the newspapers. Once the program became known, then obviously the terrorists were not going to use these methods any more." …
“That’s the way it is in this war,” says Kean. “There are a number of programs we are using to try to disrupt terrorist activities, and you never know which one is going to be successful. We knew that this one already had been.”
Captain Ed continues on from there and looks at the fundamentally unserious EU and their sudden opposition to the program. So it is dead now and all the self-serving platitudes from the New York Times' editor will not bring it back.
The leaker(s) must be found and punished. Frankly, Bill Keller should be unemployed.
UPDATE: Others: Patterico, Rantings Profs, Sundries Shack, Roger Simon, Newsbusters, The Glittering Eye, Sweetness and Light, A Blog For All, Liberty And Justice, The Real Ugly American,
UPDATE: Tom Maguire has yet more on this subject.
